Hi, I'm Larry.

I design experiences and systems.

I design lighting for moments of awe and wonder, build tools that solve problems and feel right to use, and chase cinematic moments through photo and video.

Located in Southern California

WELCOME

Hi, I'm Larry! Currently I'm a Talent Acquisition Coordinator at Behr Paint, where I focus on the onboarding experience, build the internal tools and dashboards that make HR run more smoothly, and keeping HR data accurate and secure. I graduated from UC Riverside with a degree in Sociology, where I worked as an HR Operations Assistant supporting campus hiring and personnel management, and now I'm finishing my Master's in Information Systems at Northeastern University.

My passion lies where creativity and tech meet. I'm a Lighting Director at Stream of Praise (讚美之泉), where I design immersive visual experiences for their live productions and music videos. At Beloved Church I serve as a camera operator and broadcast director for our Sunday livestream, and occasionally mix front-of-house audio for our services.

Outside of work, I'm always building something. I run a self-hosted homelab that powers apps I've built to fit my own life, like Sage, a finance app I use every day. I love the craft of taking an idea and shaping it into something real, whether that's an app, the lighting for a new song, or chasing a certain tone when I'm mixing live audio. Lately I've been turning that same instinct toward photo and video, shooting my travels and teaching myself to color grade as I work out a visual style of my own.

Lighting Design

Lighting Director

@ Stream of Praise (讚美之泉)

Stream of Praise (讚美之泉) is one of the largest Mandarin-Chinese Christian music ministries and I've been their Show Designer and Lighting Director for more than 5 years. I design the lighting for their live productions and music video recordings, shaping the atmosphere of the room to create space for heartfelt worship and lean into moments of awe and reverence.

These productions reach Chinese communities across the world, with Stream of Praise's YouTube channel growing to over 900,000 subscribers and surpassing a billion total views.

【不需要理由 I Don't Need a Reason】現場敬拜MV (Worship MV) - 讚美之泉敬拜讚美 (31)

【唯一的使命 The Great Commission】現場敬拜MV (Worship MV) - 讚美之泉敬拜讚美 (31)

【不停讚美祢 Won't Stop Praising】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Loving Jesus" (30) | Live Worship MV

【披上讚美衣 The Robe Of Praise】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Loving Jesus" (30) | Live Worship MV

【我敬拜祢, 耶穌 I Worship You Jesus】SOP Praise & Worship Album "What Could I Bring To You" (29) | Live Worship MV

【我能給你什麼 What Could I Bring To You】SOP Praise & Worship Album "What Could I Bring To You" (29) | Live Worship MV

【讚美中信心不斷升起 Let Faith Arise In Our Praises】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Let Faith Arise" (27) | Live Worship MV

【我的生命獻給祢 I Will Offer You My Life】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Hear Our Cry" (26) | Live Worship MV

聖誕之願 A Wish For Christmas | SOP 2024 Christmas Collection

Photography

Photography Portfolio

I've been capturing moments during my recent trips to Japan, Seoul, and New York. I'm drawn to moments with a cinematic quality to them, spending as much time in the edit as behind the camera, developing a visual style of my own. Check out my journey at @larry_tsao_images on Instagram.

The camera

The camera came out of my most recent trip to Japan. A friend who'd just gotten into photography wanted to browse a used camera shop in Osaka, and while he looked at lenses I stumbled on a used Canon R50V at a price too good to pass up. I grabbed it, then found a Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 for an even better deal and walked out with both. That's what pushed me to take shooting and editing seriously.

larry_tsao_images

Shiba Park, Tokyo, Japan

1 / 15

WORK

Oct 2024 – Present
Behr Paint Company
Talent Acquisition Coordinator
I own the data and automation behind how Behr hires. I built a Power BI dashboard end-to-end (data model, source connections, visualizations) that tracks leave and return-to-work across 20+ facilities, so HRBPs and floor managers can cover production gaps before they hit. I run a daily Workday-to-Power BI pipeline that gives the President, CFO, and senior leaders weekly visibility into hiring trends by region, and I automated new-hire onboarding across SharePoint, Power Apps, and Power Automate to replace a manual process running 4-6 hires a week.
Dec 2021 – Sept 2024
UC Riverside
HR Operations Assistant
I automated HR operations across 15+ departments, building Power Automate workflows for interview scheduling and turning 200+ Workfront and DocuSign requests into one-click sends.

EDUCATION

Expected Spring 2027
Northeastern University
M.S. Information Systems
Completed 2024
UC Riverside
B.A. Sociology

LinkedInResume coming soon

Finance App — Case Study

sage-demo.larrytsao.com

Sage dashboard: a Sankey diagram of income flowing through spending categories out to individual vendors

Sage spend view: a cumulative month-rhythm chart against budgets broken down by tag

Sage portfolio: a net-worth history chart with monthly change, a positions market map, and account balances

Visit the live demo

Overview

Sage is a personal finance app I designed, built, and run in daily use. It logs every transaction automatically, then turns years of data into the analysis I actually care about, built around how I think about money rather than how a bank chooses to show it. The bar I held it to was simple: spend less time and energy than typing a row into a spreadsheet.

Problem

I wanted full ownership of my financial data, with no subscription and no third party holding my history. Other apps capture transactions fine, but none of them model the way I think about money. Capturing was the easy part; making sense of years of it was the real problem, so Sage is built around a free-text details field and a compound tag system that show where money actually goes.

How it works

When a bank text hits my phone, an iOS Shortcut forwards it, Sage parses it, matches the vendor against a learned cache, and hands me a card to approve in one tap. Roughly 75% of transactions hit that cache and need no AI at all; AI only steps in to identify genuinely unknown vendors and to write the monthly analysis, never a call per transaction. What runs today is a v2 rebuild: the first version lived in an n8n automation with Discord as the editing surface and three to four AI calls per transaction, until it drifted into chasing prediction accuracy and got slower than manual entry. I rebuilt it around the one goal that mattered.

The live demo

The demo is the same React codebase, flipped on with a single build flag. Normally the app calls an Express API backed by SQLite; in demo mode those same calls are intercepted in the browser and answered by a full SQLite database running in a Web Worker via WebAssembly, seeded with synthetic data. The entire backend runs client-side, so the demo is a static site with no server, no database, and none of my real data. Every visit reseeds, so each tab is its own clean slate.

Visit the live demo

Brand

Sage is dark, calm, and considered, built to feel like a spare moment instead of a chore. The app, the mascot, and one of the brand colors all became “Sage” in a single decision, named for the sage-green things I keep around. Amber is the trust signal, spent only on live data and the numbers that matter, so its rarity is the point. The penguin sits in a Nord-blue tile and never inverts to white, because white doesn't read as a penguin.

Midnight Fjord

#2E3440

Lamplight

#fedba2

Morning Frost

#cdd2f0

Dusk Iris

#8d94ff

Weathered Sage

#91A593

Glacier

#81A1C1

Features

Automatic capture
A bank text hits my phone, an iOS Shortcut forwards it, and Sage parses and files it in seconds.
Learned vendor cache
A learned cache recognizes about 75% of vendors on sight, so most transactions never touch AI.
Compound tags
A free-text details field and stacked tags model spending the way I actually think about it.
Budgets
Per-tag targets tracked against actuals, month to month.
Recurring queue
Pending and recurring charges land in a queue I clear with a one-tap approval.
Paystub extraction
Uploaded paystub PDFs are read into a running income history.
Holdings & net worth
A daily price refresh across accounts rolls up into net worth over time.
Travel tagging
Trips group their own spend, with award redemptions and linked fees tracked together.
Deep analysis
Charts, monthly rollups, and vendor-level breakdowns turn the ledger into insight.

Finance App

A self-hosted personal finance platform I designed and run. It pulls my transactions into one ledger with budgeting, recurring detection, and travel tagging. I built it because I wanted full ownership of my financial data and a tool shaped around how I actually budget.

Visit site

LIGHTING DESIGN

Show Designer & Lighting Director at Stream of Praise

I've been the show designer and lighting director for Stream of Praise (讚美之泉), one of the largest Mandarin-Chinese Christian music ministries, for more than 5 years. I light their live productions and music-video recordings, shaping the room to lean into awe and make space for worship. The productions reach Chinese communities worldwide, with the channel past 900,000 subscribers and over a billion views.

Lighting designShow designLive productionMusic video

Visit

Lighting designShow designLive productionMusic video

Visit

Want to talk lighting, a build, or just trade travel photos?

Reach out.

hello@larrytsao.com larry_tsao_images larrytsao6

Resume coming soon

I design experiences and systems.

01. ABOUT ME

02. LIGHTING

Lighting Director

【不需要理由 I Don't Need a Reason】現場敬拜MV (Worship MV) - 讚美之泉敬拜讚美 (31)

【唯一的使命 The Great Commission】現場敬拜MV (Worship MV) - 讚美之泉敬拜讚美 (31)

【不停讚美祢 Won't Stop Praising】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Loving Jesus" (30) | Live Worship MV

【披上讚美衣 The Robe Of Praise】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Loving Jesus" (30) | Live Worship MV

【我敬拜祢, 耶穌 I Worship You Jesus】SOP Praise & Worship Album "What Could I Bring To You" (29) | Live Worship MV

【我能給你什麼 What Could I Bring To You】SOP Praise & Worship Album "What Could I Bring To You" (29) | Live Worship MV

【讚美中信心不斷升起 Let Faith Arise In Our Praises】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Let Faith Arise" (27) | Live Worship MV

【我的生命獻給祢 I Will Offer You My Life】SOP Praise & Worship Album "Hear Our Cry" (26) | Live Worship MV

聖誕之願 A Wish For Christmas | SOP 2024 Christmas Collection

03. PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography Portfolio

04. CAREER

Behr Paint Company

UC Riverside

Northeastern University

UC Riverside

05. HIGHLIGHTED PROJECTS

Finance App — Case Study

06. ROLES & PRODUCTION

Show Designer & Lighting Director at Stream of Praise

07. CONTACT